Tampa Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said he has spent more time with both Trump and DeSantis “than anyone else” insists the pair will not go head-head in the 2024 presidential primary as they are “on the same side”.
Speaking to Breitbart at Turning Point USA Action Summit yesterday, Gaetz, 40, said he believed it was “highly unlikely” that the popular Florida governor would put his name in to be a candidate if former president Trump decided to run.
“I would go so far as to say there is no human walking around the earth that has spent more time with both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis than I have,” said Gaetz.
“I spent a lot of time with the president in the Oval when he was leading our country. I was Governor DeSantis’s transition chairman, and I was heavily involved in his campaign,” he explained.
Gaetz has always been a staunch supporter of Trump’s. Earlier this year, he launched a bid to make the former president the House Speaker should the GOP win back control of the house in November:
“Give us the ability to fire Nancy Pelosi, take back the majority, impeach Joe Biden, and I am going to nominate Donald Trump for speaker of the United States House of Representatives,” he said at a rally in Georgia, although Trump later said he wasn’t interested in the proposition.
#BeOffended 🔥 pic.twitter.com/c3VyPaiiZP
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) July 27, 2022
Instead of potentially dividing and weakening the GOP by running against each other, Gaetz believes DeSantis will instead run for the leadership sometime in the future, leaving the playing field open for his friendly rival:
“What I can tell you is these guys are on the same side,” he said.
“We want to see a Republican Party that is a national party, a winning party, a fighting party.
“I think President Trump really views DeSantis’s success with great pride, that he took someone who was in Congress and that he saw great potential in and he nurtured that leadership that Ron DeSantis has now displayed to the world,” he continued.
Ron DeSantis v. Donald Trump: Which Florida Man will the GOP nominate in ’24? https://t.co/0zOYBI52Tw pic.twitter.com/coD4I0rxsG
— Politics Politics Politics Podcast (@Px3Tweets) January 19, 2022
“It’s a great working relationship that all three of us have. So, I think it’s largely a media creation that they want to find ways to cause schisms and disagreements in our movement.”
He went on to say that the Republican Party enjoyed the success it did in Florida because voters were enthralled by both the political powerhouses working together as a team:
“Look, there is a reason we won Florida by such a large margin—a margin that people never really see in Florida—in the 2020 election for Donald Trump. It was because he and Ron DeSantis were out there hand in glove campaigning together and getting crowds fired up together,” he said.
“Here, they are on different nights but at the same conference—we’re going to need both of those great leaders in order to I think have a catchment apparatus for the energy and enthusiasm that is out there for Republicans.”
The MAGA fan who tied the knot with his wife Ginger Luckey last year, concluded by saying that he would like the party to focus on a strong set of deliverable policies including “more on the border, more on big tech, we should have done more to constrain the regulatory state.”
“I don’t want to be in a circumstance where Republicans win by default and then lack the vision and the clarity to understand what our compact is with our voters.”
This story syndicated with permission from Jo Marney, Author at Trending Politics
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